‘With Davina’s muffins I can’t blame her,’ MacNee said lightly. ‘But tell me, Rhona, did any of you ever say anything to Mrs Elder about Dr Randall?’
‘Not exactly . . .’
MacNee raised his eyebrows.
Rhona looked uncomfortable. ‘Well, if you ask me he’s a right bastard. Davina just gave her a wee hint a few weeks ago. It’s not right if the wife’s the last one to know.’
Even if you haven’t a shred of proof that there’s any truth in it. The ethics of the gossip circuit! But MacNee said only, ‘What did she say?’
‘Nothing much. Just sort of went a bit pink and let on she didn’t understand. But she knew fine what Davina was saying.’
And had Joanna’s starving herself, MacNee wondered as he got back into his car, dated from the time of Davina’s ‘wee hint’? If your husband was serious about another woman, meaning that you were going to lose a grand lifestyle like this, it would fairly put you off your food, right enough.
So his instincts hadn’t been wrong; she’d certainly lied about her ignorance of the rumours. Had she lied to him about anything else?
Muriel Henderson locked the side door, then followed Enid Davis down the path. It was only just half-past twelve, but the doctors had pushed the patients through in good time this morning, so anything else could just wait till Monday. She’d been keen to get away promptly. It was the first time she’d ever been over the threshold of Enid’s house so she was pleased about the invitation to lunch. Well, she’d sort of invited herself, really, but then Enid was a quiet wee soul who probably wouldn’t have liked to ask.
They were crossing the road when a car appeared, slowing down as it reached the surgery. She clicked her tongue in irritation. ‘If that’s someone needing a repeat prescription and they think we’re going back to open up for them, they’ve another think coming,’ she said belligerently. Her expression was one of uncompromising hostility until the car stopped and she saw who was driving.
‘Oh, it’s you, Constable! I thought you were one of the patients – they’re awful inconsiderate nowadays! I nearly gave you a right telling-off!’
‘I’m glad I escaped that!’ DC Kingsley laughed as he got out of the car – he really was a nice-looking lad! ‘I was in Knockhaven anyway and I just thought I’d drop in and see how you were getting on. But I see you’re on your way home. I don’t want to detain you . . .’
Considerate, too. She beamed at him. ‘Och, not at all. We’re just away round to Enid’s house down the High Street there for a bit of lunch, aren’t we, Enid?’ As Enid murmured agreement, she went on, ‘Actually, there was something that might interest you – you know what they’re saying now?’
Muriel could almost see his ears prick up. ‘It’s all over the village. Willie says it was all just havers about him being scared, he was just upset about it all. Says it was definitely nothing to do with him. What do you think of that?’
He wasn’t impressed. ‘Oh yes, I’ve heard that too.’
Piqued, she went on, ‘But do you see what that means? If it wasn’t those drugs people, it has to have been someone else!’
‘Yes, I suppose it must.’ The signs of impatience were obvious.
Perhaps he wasn’t such a nice young man after all. ‘The point is, it could be someone local, someone we all know. It’s not a nice thought, that. Enough to make your flesh creep.’
‘Yes, I suppose it is.’
He didn’t seem as shocked as he ought to be. Disappointed, Muriel sniffed. ‘Time we were getting along, if you’ll excuse us . . .’
With only a brief ‘Thanks,’ he jumped back into the car and drove off, a bit too fast. ‘Well!’ Muriel said pettishly. ‘That’s the last time I put myself out for him!’
It wasn’t the last of Muriel’s disappointments. Enid hadn’t made much of an effort for lunch, just tinned soup and ham rolls, when Muriel had been looking forward to some of her cooking. She hadn’t even been offered a wee sherry, just some home-made lemon squash. Lemon squash!
The table had been set in the kitchen too and despite Muriel’s hints Enid didn’t show her round the house. She’d said, ‘What’s your sitting room like?’ but when Enid just said, ‘Small,’ even Muriel didn’t quite have the nerve to demand to inspect it.
And there weren’t any family photographs or anything to look at. There was one photo on the wall, a view of a loch and hills behind, but since Muriel knew already that Enid came from somewhere up the West Coast it was hardly worth the effort she was having to make just to keep the conversation going. You’d have thought Enid grudged the very food Muriel was putting in her mouth. Not a very gracious hostess.
So, when Enid brought her a mug of instant coffee – and not so much as a biscuit to go with it – it was with a certain malice that she said, ‘You’ll have your big chance now, Enid, won’t you?’
Enid looked at her blankly. ‘What do you mean?’
Muriel giggled. ‘With Dr Lewis, of course! Now he’s rid of that wife of his he’ll be wanting someone who can look after him properly.’
Colour rose in Enid’s cheeks. She said stiffly, ‘Please don’t go making stupid remarks like that, Muriel. I like Dr Lewis, yes, and I don’t think Dr Ashley was a good wife to him. She was a right bitch, if you ask me.’
She paid no attention to Muriel’s shocked gasp. ‘But it doesn’t mean I’ve any plan to take her place and quite honestly I don’t think he’d so much as look at me. I’m not deluding myself that I’m his sort. You don’t think so either, so I’d be grateful if you’d stop all this, right now.’
‘Well, really!’ Muriel’s cheeks had gone bright red. ‘I’ve never been so insulted in my life!’ She set down her mug on the table with a bang and stood up. Picking up her coat and bag from the table, she went on, ‘I’ve tried to be a friend to you, Enid, because you don’t seem to have many friends. And after today I’m not surprised. Thank you for the snack.’ She laid emphasis on the last word – she wasn’t going to call it lunch – and went out, slamming the door behind her.
She felt positively stunned. Meek little Enid, turning on her like that! Mind you, she’d always said still waters ran deep and she’d believe she was capable of anything after this. If they’d seen the way Enid had looked at her they wouldn’t be searching around to find someone capable of multiple murder.
After all, it wasn’t natural Enid should be so touchy, was it, when Muriel had just been teasing her in a jokey kind of way. Maybe there was more to it; maybe she and Dr Lewis had something going on after all. Perhaps she should just mention it to that young policeman, even if she had decided to be pretty frosty if he came round again. After all, helping the police was her civic duty.
Pleased with her own public-spiritedness, she walked back across the main road to her own, much more satisfactory bungalow in Mayfield Gardens where you had a better class of neighbour – like Dr Lewis, just round the corner – instead of the riff-raff you found in the lower town.
13
‘Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd’st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep . . .’
The voices, led by the muted strains of a silver band, wavered on the damp air. Beneath a leaden sky the crowd surrounded the lifeboat shed and filled its pier, then spilled out along Shore Street, falling silent at the end of the hymn so that the only sound was the moaning of the green-black sea. On a dais in front of the shed the minister, black-robed, raised his hand in the final blessing and the crowd mutely fell aside to allow the three coffins, draped in lifeboat flags and shouldered by men in lifeboat blazers, passage to the waiting hearses.
Behind came the chief mourners: Luke Smith’s parents, his mother leaning heavily on her husband’s arm as if she could barely stand unsupported; Katy Anderson, alone, white-faced, tearless and blank-eyed; Lewis Randall, his face sombre and unrevealing, with his mother in a well-cut coat and black felt hat wi
th a dipping brim. Luke’s parents were taking him directly back home for burial and Ashley was to be cremated at a private ceremony in Stranraer later. Only Rob Anderson would lie in the local cemetery, but there would be a big attendance at the graveside.
Slowly the rest of the crowd began to drift away, most people heading up the hill to the town hall, where the ladies of the Lifeboat Committee had provided tea. Links in this rural area were strong and they came from all over the area, from Kirkluce to the north, Whithorn to the south, Wigtown in the west and a dozen other small communities in between.
Marjory Fleming stood to one side, observing. MacNee, Kerr and Kingsley would all be doing the same somewhere, although she couldn’t see any of them. She could see Nat Rettie, though, who’d been released without charge for the moment at least, standing near the front in his school uniform, with his hands in his pockets and his head lowered. She saw too with dismay the distinctive hennaed head of Kylie MacEwan beside him.
No one was speaking to them; indeed, a little space had been left round about as if no one was willing to risk even coincidental association. Kylie had confirmed that they had been together that evening, though her assertion that they hadn’t been doing anything except ‘just talking a bit’ didn’t exactly instil confidence in the reliability of her evidence. And, thought Marjory anxiously, what effect could all this be having on her own Cat?
But her domestic worries would have to wait. She was here to work. Professionally, she wasn’t happy, and that was an understatement on a par with saying the new Scottish Parliament seemed to be going a wee bit over budget. The forty-eight hours after the murders, in which most cases are solved if they’re to be solved at all, were long gone. There had been unprecedented levels of public support and information, yet here she was over a week later, having sifted through a volume of evidence which had sent her computer into one of its periodic fits of nervous exhaustion and threatened to do the same to its operator, no further forward.
The golden rule of crime investigation, ‘Every contact leaves a trace’, was about as relevant here as a copy of the words of the Red Flag at a New Labour Party conference. Despite the reams of information from the scene of crime team and the pathologist giving impressively precise details about the wreck and the deaths, it was really no more than a fatal accident report. The murderer’s contact was limited to those two lamps placed at the scene, and Fleming would be willing to bet her egg money that all the lab report would produce was a sophisticated chemical analysis of the paints used, naming in the last line a popular commercial brand, available in your nearest B&Q.
There was always the other time-honoured principle, ‘Who benefits?’, but as the Super had said to her with more than an edge of impatience in his voice, ‘You don’t seem even to have worked out who the victim is in this case, Marjory, let alone the murderer.’ This was, she had to admit, kind of an important weakness in their investigation.
Eyewitnesses seemed the only hope. There was certainly no lack of willingness from the public: judging by what had crossed her desk every man, woman and child in the relevant area – and a good number who weren’t – had chipped in with their tuppence-worth. Fleming’s personal favourite was the woman who had phoned to say that her dog, ten miles away in Whithorn, had suddenly sat up and howled, ‘just when those poor souls would be perishing’! Perhaps it wasn’t that funny. They were just grasping at anything that fractionally alleviated the gloom.
Given the planning, the Wrecker must have checked out the site at least once, probably more often than that. But under cover of darkness, say, who would notice a torch beam on that isolated shore? Or even in daylight, days or weeks ago, who would remember an innocent rambler scaling the rocks? It was only by chance that Tam had spotted the lamps.
And if the plan had failed? If the more experienced Duncan had been at the helm, if Anderson hadn’t been distracted, if the lifeboat had come safe home, would the Wrecker even now be working on a new one?
Yes, Fleming thought with sudden conviction, yes. It would be another low-risk scheme you could walk away from. And that, she suddenly thought, was the key to it – the Wrecker’s determination not to pay for the crime. Laura’s term, pathologically solipsistic, had highlighted that: common as the instinct for self-interest may be, this was the cold-blooded sacrifice of two lives – innocent by any standard – for no reason other than improving your chances of getting away with eliminating a third. So perhaps she’d moved a step closer to knowing what the Wrecker was like, which didn’t, unfortunately, answer the ‘Who?’ or ‘Why?’ questions.
You didn’t, normally, have to know why, except for professional satisfaction. Why anyone did anything was always highly speculative and all you needed in court was hard evidence against them, but this case, with its lack of any form of hard evidence, was different. In this case, motive was all they had to guide them to the victim, never mind the perpetrator.
The village was awash with rumour and counter-rumour. It was all to do with drugs. It was nothing to do with drugs. Lewis Randall had done it because his wife was having an affair with Ritchie Elder. The doctor would never do a thing like that and anyway, people just said there was an affair. Joanna Elder had been behaving strangely – or maybe it was natural enough, if the rumour about her husband was true . . .
And now Kingsley had come back with a new one, that Randall had been having a relationship with Enid Davis, one of the surgery receptionists. They’d have to follow up on that one too, because the trouble was that you couldn’t ever dismiss a story out of hand. Small-town gossips had the dirty habit of occasional accuracy.
What hadn’t emerged was a shred of hard evidence. There was Jon’s belief (she’d almost said determination) that it was all drugs-related and Tam’s assertion that both women he had interviewed had been lying about something. Tansy hadn’t come up with much that was useful yet, and both men agreed that interviewing Lewis Randall was, as MacNee put it, like talking to Teflon – ‘It all just slides off.’
And that was the problem at the moment: everything sliding off. Nothing seemed to stick, nothing held together to offer even a coherent theory, while she was under pressure from every side – not least from the occupants of the car which was passing her now as she walked up the hill.
Chief Constable Menzies and Superintendent Donald Bailey were sitting in the back, resplendent in their best uniforms. She turned, her hand half-raised in greeting, but Donald, on her side of the car, didn’t see her. Or ignored her, quite likely. She wasn’t flavour of the month at the moment.
Don was desperate for a quick result and he wasn’t going to get it on this one; however hard he pushed, she wasn’t going to be bounced into ill-considered action. He was very keen, too keen, perhaps, on the drugs theory, Kingsley somehow having managed to bend his ear about it. It was neat, plausible, and he liked the idea that cracking the murder case might smash the drugs ring at the same time, killing two birds for the price of one budgetary stone.
But whatever Jon might say, Fleming wasn’t ready to go along with it – not yet, anyway. It just didn’t smell right; you’d only to think of that case in Ayr, a young man who’d been dumb enough to tangle with the big boys and ended up with two broken legs after being pushed into the harbour. It wasn’t subtle, it wasn’t elaborately planned and, while he had declared afterwards that it had been an accident, no one was in any doubt that this was a message, loud and clear, ‘Don’t mess with us.’
Today, if things had gone as the Wrecker intended, this would only have been a service mourning another tragic accident at sea. Marjory could almost feel a mind, a someone out there – someone in this crowd, even – who was cunning, ruthless, totally self-absorbed, and now – afraid? Someone who knew the lifeboat had been called out: well, sound tests had shown that was most of Knockhaven. Someone familiar with the tides: you’d only to take a walk along the shore. Someone who knew the pattern of the leading lights coming into Knockhaven harbour: Tansy had been able to check them out in
Reid’s Almanac in the local library. Someone who hated enough, or loved enough, or was frightened or greedy enough to kill three people to get one . . . She sighed. A hamster probably got pretty sick of going round and round in a wheel getting nowhere as well.
The town hall was a handsome Edwardian building with a gallery across one end and a stage at the other. Trestle tables had been set out to line the walls, laden with plates of the sandwiches, scones and shortbread apparently deemed suitably sombre; tea and coffee were being dispensed from a line of urns just below the stage.
Marjory spotted her mother almost immediately, directing operations to replenish empty plates, and was starting to make her way towards her through the milling throng when Bill’s voice at her shoulder hailed her: ‘Hello, stranger!’
She turned with a smile to kiss him, wincing inwardly. She hadn’t got home for supper once since all this happened and this morning Cat, coming into the kitchen, had given a small shriek and cried, ‘Who is this strange woman? Oh yes, I remember – she used to be my mother.’ Bill had said Cat seemed to be eating all right, but if his daughter was being devious he would be no match for her.
‘Quite a turnout, isn’t it?’ Bill said. ‘Janet’s in her element, mind you, queen-beeing around. She’s got half of Galloway roped in to help with serving the tea and on baking duties – even Laura’s made scones though I’d have to say if she’d told me they were pancakes I wouldn’t have argued. She’s over there.’
Marjory waved to her friend, then went to speak to her mother. Enid Davis would probably be here somewhere, and perhaps even Joanna Elder as well; Janet always seemed to know everyone, and having been so involved in the organisation for today she might be able to point them out.
The Darkness and the Deep Page 19
